


glory be to God for dappled things.

by diaghileafs



Category: Call the Midwife
Genre: F/M, First Kiss, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-04
Updated: 2016-09-04
Packaged: 2018-08-12 22:44:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7952122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diaghileafs/pseuds/diaghileafs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's an ordinary day and Shelagh has a revelation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	glory be to God for dappled things.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Happiness is something written about in romance novels and fairy tales, not a tangible feeling in the pit of your stomach. Surely it’s not as cheap as that, it cannot be.

For the last two months, this kitchen has been a mere curiosity and she, a voyeur, has paid concessions in butter and bleach. Breadcrumbs on the worktop and tea towels with a ditzy floral print, each handled with the same careful grace.

But it is this day, this ordinary afternoon in April, when something shifts inside her, inside the flat, finally letting her scent occupy the cavities. When Shelagh looks out the window, over the sweet peas she planted – at a moggy stowing away on a milk float, and she feels alive. Distinctly aware of her own shadow; reflection in silverware, a woman humming, wearing trousers with loose fabric that moves as music flows through the furnishings. Her belongs no longer seem arbitrary in comparison to plates that have always hung above the sink; her book is on the sideboard, a kirby grip between its pages, she is here. Shelagh is a woman, whose ring (left hand, fourth finger) glints underneath the flour. Timothy will finish his homework, come and help her. Patrick’s day will have gone well or badly. Either way, the three of them will have dinner, he will do the washing up and she will go back to her lodgings.

She wants no other, nothing else and as the feeling shifts, she does not feel disappointed, simply puts the kettle on because she loves to have tea brewing when he gets home.

Perhaps this is, in fact, the very essence of happiness. It is not the beginning, as she would have imagined; marriage will bring something else, a quiet kind of joy and everything after. But looking at Timothy, Shelagh does not know if it is possible to love a child more, because she forgets a hundred times a day that he didn’t grow years ago as a fish inside her and whenever she does remember – for half a second – it does not matter.

The front door slams with the wind when Patrick is setting his briefcase down in the hall, shutting them off, it seems, from an old world. He is smiling and she smiles back, relieved that her happiness is not shrunken to selfishness in the face of twelve hours of second-hand suffering.

He takes her hand (they are generous with turn of the century courtesies) but changes his mind, “you really are,” he sighs, dusting flour gently off her face with his worn fingers which come unexpectedly to rest on her jaw, “some sort of angel.”

Neither of them means to lean in, for her hands to press into the weave of his coat and their lips meld together in a sweet, not entirely chaste kiss.

“Patrick,” Shelagh opens her eyes first, looks at his eyelashes adoringly and their little vibrations of life. She is present, “you’ve never done that before.”

They are both in love; the drama of the last year falls and crumbs, dust to be beaten off the new rug she found in _John Lewis_ (just the right red, not too pink, not too orange), everything apart from that will settle. His words are sincere, “I’ve been meaning to.”

They assume their places, mother and father, “I’m stuck on the last question,” Timothy calls from the other side of the living room.  

And – between apple flan and algebra – is the epitome of purpose.


End file.
